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Is Dropcam's Lead In Wi-Fi Video Cameras Insurmountable? Simplicam Doesn't Think So

Wi-Fi video cameras have been around for over a decade, but if you’re like me and you got in early on the game, your only reward for being an early adopter was a poor user experience.

Mine was one of the first D-Link network cameras, and the nicest thing I can say is that overall the experience wasn’t optimal. One can hardly blame D-Link, however, since back then there wasn’t an easy way to archive video in the cloud or monitor what was happening back at the homestead through a smartphone.

Well, it’s 2014 and that’s all changed, because Dropcam figured out a way to harness the cloud and mobile to create the first appealing and affordable consumer Wi-Fi netcam.

The company first started developing software for third-party video cameras back in 2009, but by 2012 they’d developed their own. The company shipped the Dropcam HD (later renamed just the Dropcam) in January 2012 and it didn’t take long for them to have a hit as consumers embraced the Dropcam’s ease of use and cloud-based video archive.

The Simplicam from Arcsoft

Flash-forward a couple years, a new model (the Dropcam Pro) and a few hundred thousand units later, Dropcam had established itself as the undisputed leader in the consumer Wi-Fi video camera market by the time GoogleGoogle/Nest swooped them up for over half a billion dollars.

Game-Set-Match?

So now, with Dropcam being backed by Google/Nest and all the resources that brings with it, not to mention a strong consumer brand, this market should be be game-set-match for them, right? In other words, aspiring Wi-Fi camera makers should just pack it up and go home.

Not so fast.

Sure, often times early advantages in markets can be defendable, but time has shown that early advantages in embryonic markets are remarkably tenuous, even for large companies. Just ask 3Com (home networking), Palm (PDAs), Diamond (MP3 players) and so on: consumers have no real allegiance early in markets, particularly if a) the incumbent fails to innovate b) they inconvenience the consumer by forcing a ‘platform tax’ (Windows Media Center anyone?) onto them or c) a competitor offers a truly differentiated or price-competitive product.

While I think it’s too early to see if the first two factors plague Dropcam post-acquisition, I definitely think there’s still room in the market for innovation.

That’s good for Arcsoft, who today introduced the Simplicam Wi-Fi video camera with a feature that I think most people would find pretty valuable: it tells you if that thing it’s seeing in your house is Fido or an unexpected human visitor. That’s because the camera has facial detection capabilities, which gives the camera the ability to tell a human face from other types of objects.

And while facial detection can’t tell you who the person is (that would be facial recognition), Arcsoft’s VP of Marketing, Caroline Tien-Spalding, told me on the Smart Home Show that facial recognition and identification features are currently in development (she also noted that moving from detection to recognition brings with its additional concerns about privacy).

The Simplicam also offers a price advantage when it comes to cloud recording. The company’s entry price point for archiving is $49 a year, which gives a consumer access to the last 24 hours of video. Dropcam’s entry point for cloud video archiving is $99 a year.

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